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Landscape Special Interest Group February 2019

In this session, we discussed building a
structure that you want to reuse, such as a wood shed, turning the structure
into a symbol and importing that symbol into another file; we also covered
using the Renderworks Camera—including turning a camera view into a viewport—and
using the Clip Cube for design work as well as for client presentations.

Landscape Special Interest Group February
2019

Topics Covered:

00:14 Our objective was to build a structure that we wanted to reuse, such as a wood shed. On first glance, the wood shed looked pretty simple, but a second look showed that it had footings, lattice-type walls, and a sloped roof with rafters. There were two challenges: how much detail did we want to show in our model, and what would give us the capability to just grab it and reuse it in another project? Our first thought was to make it as a symbol. I often start in the middle when I’m constructing a symbol—that way I can easily figure out the math for where to place everything. We started with a Floor object. We needed to create various classes for our structure so that we would have the choice later of turning parts on and off—we assumed that we would need ultimate flexibility, with classes for footings, floor structure, the floor, walls, roof framing, and a roof. Next, we went through each step needed to construct the wood shed, including using framing members and using a curtain wall to customize the look of the walls. Remember that just hovering over an object and right clicking will cause a command to act on that object—you don’t have to select the object first, and then right click and select the command. The Curtain Wall Grid dialogue box allows you to change the horizontal and vertical grids. Our roof looked weird to begin with, but roof objects can be easily modified. We demonstrated how to make a few different roof styles, including the monopitch roof that we needed. Even though we modified the object, it remained a roof object—that way, we could easily modify it again in the future. The Fit Walls to Objects command cut off the walls at the underside of the roof.

25:59 Next, we looked at our options for copying the object and exporting it to another file. We covered how to turn the wood shed into a symbol, going through each of the options in the Create Symbol dialogue box. Now, when you move it, the entire object moves. We created a blank document and experimented with importing the wood shed into the new file. You can drag and drop the symbol from the Resource Manager into your new file.

32:54 We added a Renderworks Camera to the drawing. If you were using it on a site model, you could use the Send To Surface command to get it to the right height. Remember that if your camera is activated, the camera position will move as you change your 2D/3D view. You can get the perspective that you want by adjusting the Camera Height and the Look To Height on the camera’s Object Info palette—we discussed the relationship between the two. You can turn a camera view into a viewport. When you do that, the camera is selected and, from then on, bound into that viewport—it’s no longer on the Visualization palette. It’s really easy to start with one camera on the design layer and make multiple viewport copies that you can then experiment with.

50:23 Choosing the Clip Cube command will put a box around an object that you’ve selected or around all the objects in the design layer. It allows you to work on a part of your design. You can imbed a Clip Cube into a viewport. A Clip Cube view can be an easy way to give a client a 3D view of your design—sometimes they have a difficult time visualizing the design until they see it in 3D!

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